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Are you considering to switch to WP Engine Hosting to host your website?
If you are, I can only congratulate you in advance, because I know that you will not regret this decision. After one of my clients introduced me to WP Engine Hosting few years ago, I was hooked immediately and switched all of my WordPress Environments to WP Engine.
Since then, if anyone is looking for the best hosting provider available, I would always recommend WP Engine because there’s really no other logical choice to choose from. To those who are slightly budget conscious, you can always start with SiteGround for the first year, but eventually, I will still recommend them to move to WP Engine.
If you are reading this post, you probably are already on the fence. You know or have heard of the great service and support that WP Engine provides, the last piece of the puzzle is how fast it performs, before you jump in and make the investment.
In this article, I will cover the Speed Test Results I got from Google PageSpeed Insights tool, with various configurations, all while using WP Engine Hosting.
For each of the test, I will be loading up the most common setup templates, and apply no further optimizations. What you see would be what you get directly from WP Engine. I will let you know which template I used, and the results I got for both Desktop and Mobile.
Let’s begin!
For the first test, I will just be using the Default WordPress install which is the “Twenty Twenty”, “Twenty Twenty One” or “Twenty Twenty Two” theme.
With this theme, we can test the speed of the WP Engine servers out of the box, before adding any other bloat that comes with more complicated themes.
With the basic installation loaded, You can see that we are getting 100 for both Mobile & Desktop, which is not surprising knowing that there are no bloat. This shows that WP Engine comes with perfect score out of the box.
Note that this result is also the same for an installation with an Empty Astra Theme, because well… the website is empty and Astra is generally a clean theme, so I am not creating a new section just to test the speed of an empty Astra Theme.
For the second test, I will be testing WP Engine’s speed when loading one of the Astra Starter Template. The reason why I choose Astra Starter Template (Steak House Theme) is because:
With the “Steak House Theme” loaded, and with no additional optimization. We can see that the page loads at 91 for Mobile and 98 for Desktop. This is pretty good, and I am sure with some really basic optimization, it could easily be 100 for both.
Note that this is a basic Astra installation with no Page Builders installed.
Now with basic installations out of the way, we are finally at where we are interested in.
The speed test with Page Builders! I have selected “Elementor Pro” as the choice here for the very same reason:
I have also removed the Astra Theme and installed the barebone Hello Theme by Elementor - to make sure the speed test is fair and not affected by the theme. The only plugins installed are also just Elementor and Elementor Pro.
I have also installed an Elementor Page Template provided in the Elementor Library.
With the “Insurance Theme” installed, we can see that the desktop performance is at 97, which is honestly pretty good and surprising to me. The mobile speed is lagging behind a little at only 73.
Once again, these speed are calculation without additional caching or image optimization plugin, so that we can assess the speed of WP Engine Hosting most accurately.
With some basic optimization, i believe we can push Elementor Desktop speed to 100 and Mobile speed to possibly 90 + region.
Based on the Speed Test above, I think its pretty fair to say that WP Engine performs pretty well in all the environments and infrastructure. With additional tweaks and more attention spent on page speed optimization tweaks, I think most websites won’t go wrong with WP Engine.
If budget is not a problem, I would strongly recommend you to use WP Engine Hosting. It’s the hosting provider I go to for all of my clients sites, and have 0 complaints so far.
If you are looking for ways to further optimize your website, here are my recommended plugins to further improve the speed of WP Engine. There are many plugins available, these are only the ones i use, and I would suggest you to give some of them a try.
The main 2 plugins i used would be WP Rocket for general optimization, and also Short Pixel Adaptive Image (SPAI) for any image optimization.
WP Rocket is an easy to use “set and forget” optimization tool that helps with both CSS/JS caching and minification. SPAI is a plugin that not only lazy loads the image, but also includes a CDN that delivers webp image with the correct size to mobile, which I think is extremely valuable.
Some people might not agree with WP Rocket, but this plugin was previously the only caching plugin recommended on WP Engine based on this article, so i have stuck with it since.
I am 100% sure there are newer and better speed optimization plugins out there, so if you disagree, you may give google search a try.
Honestly..
I don’t think I can really answer this question, because there are many other hosting providers that I have not tried or tested. If you ask this question in the any WordPress Community, I am sure you will get a wide variety of answer.
If you are looking for my personal opinion, I indeed think that WP Engine is the Best WordPress Hosting Provider you can find today. I have tried BlueHost, SiteGround, WPX Hosting and some more shady providers. None of them performs as well as WP Engine.
I can only suggest you to give it a try for one year. That’s all for this post, once again, if there are any question, leave your comments!
